


To Each His Own Lonely Grave

by ignorant_birds



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, Sandy and Pitch hit each other a lot, just generally lots of shadows being shadows, shadows being puked up, shadows being weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 09:11:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/721358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignorant_birds/pseuds/ignorant_birds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you shouldn't stick your nose where it doesn't belong. Sandy, unfortunately, has a habit of sticking his whole self everywhere it doesn't belong, and a great many places it's absolutely not wanted, besides. Pitch would complain, but there's the matter of being reduced to a snapped pile of bone and bile and blood, and besides, someone's got to help him clean the rabid mares out of his attic.</p><p>A short story in which everyone gets beaten up an awful lot, and very little understanding is actually come to, but everyone tries really hard, God bless them. Well, maybe Pitch doesn't try too very hard. But you can't really blame him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Old Circles, Old Signs

**Author's Note:**

> Post-Movie, slight Bookverse lore hither and yon if you squint. Blacksand if you like (and squint) and not Blacksand if you don't. It's all good here.

Contrary to popular assumption, Sandy and the Man in the Moon didn't always see eye to eye. Sanderson Mansnoozie---a title the Man gave him, in point of fact, though he often failed to use it; it was such a big name for a little star---swore to protect the children under the Moon's watchful gaze. He did not swear allegiance to the Moon.

The other Guardians listened to the Moon with the reverent ears of children, and Sandy approved of this. It was as it should be. The Man in the Moon was lifetimes older than most of them could imagine being; his experience, his patience, his all-seeing eye made him a leader, and they were but students yet. They had everything to gain by following his lead.

Sandy, on the other hand, had been around most of the known universe by now, and he'd be damned if he took orders from a giant rock.

The boy was the son of the Lunanoffs. He took after his father in quite a few ways, and that was good; there was the same iron willpower, the same ceaseless optimism the Tsar Lunar had. He also took after his mother, which was better. She was a diplomat that could send kings running with a well-placed question (or a better-placed rapier point) alone. Sandy still remembered her calm eyes. Her son had not, however, inherited the gleam of mischeif that would sometimes light in her face, and Sandy regretted this. She was something else, was Tsarina Lunanoff.

All in all, the Lunanoffs' son had inherited much of their combined good natures, as well as an excess of their intelligence. Experience had wizened him, even if it had often come from the other end of a telescope; and compassion, great and all-encompassing compassion, had lit the way towards a long and admirable rule. Sandy rarely felt the need to complain. The Man in the Moon was a wonderful man.

But sometimes he was just a goddamned idiot.

Sandy tried to explain this to the Man in the Moon without being offensive. It was a little difficult.

It wasn't that the Tsar Lunar was being unreasonable, he explained. It wasn't that Sandy didn't see where he was coming from. Perfectly understandable, all of it! And god knows, you've got to be cautious when there are so many lives relying on the choices you make. Oh, Sandy sympathized greatly with his position right now, and would, indeed, be taking it himself, if he hadn't---you know---done the aforementioned zipping around half the known galaxies. There were, he attempted to explain, times when you had to break the rules. Not even break them, if that was what was holding him up here; bend them a little, coax them to take slightly unnatural shapes. Teach them a little yoga. Sandy was all for rules, but he was the best there was at teaching them a few flexibility exercises. Sandy could get rules to put their feet behind their heads.

The Man in the Moon was not buying it. Sandy retained his calm, erased the whiteboard, and tried again. This was important, making Tsar Lunar understand. Very important. Important for the balance of the world, important on the principle of the thing. And important, very important, for Sandy himself.

The Tsar had not traveled the universe. He had not seen the death of stars, violent and compressed and terrible. He had not seen the way shadows consume a ship, ripping through hulls and keels alike until sailors can do nothing but cower in the darkest corners of the hold and wait until the moment they are found---and scream, and scream, and scream. He had certainly never heard those screams.

The Man in the Moon had seen many things from his seat in the sky, but he had not felt the way those screams could stay with you for a thousand years and more. Sandy had. Sandy had heard them, and the memory could stab tiny slivers of pain into him yet.

So he argued. He reasoned. He suggested. He sternly denied. When none of it worked, he wheedled; he comforted; he promised. (He may have made, perhaps, one or two promises he was not entirely sure he could keep. Sometimes that's necessary.) He swore, both well and ill, and he said a thing or two he might later regret. He certainly failed to provide the Man in the Moon with all the respect he was due. If Sandy still wore the stripes of a star pilot, he was fairly sure he'd be deregulated by now. He even went so far as to say something out loud, once or twice, and they both knew that was not in good taste.

The thing is, when a rock speaks you listen regardless of what it has to say, because it's a rock and it's talking. And when Sandy spoke, well, he didn't have a stone's record of silence, but he was pretty close. The Man in the Moon still didn't sound convinced, but he listened well, which was more than could be said for most people. He was nice enough to even gleam in acknowledgement once or twice. And when Sandy had finished, breathless and silently recovering at least some ounce of his dignity, the Man in the Moon glimmered in thought.

Very well, he said at last. If you are resolute, I entrust you with this task.

The Sandman was at least diplomatic enough to avoid a round of celebratory fireworks. He did, however, send up a very polite swirl of grateful sand.

A question, said the Man in the Moon. The only question there ever is, at the end of things. Why?

On his rooftop, the Sandman hesitated. There were many things the Tsar Lunar was too young to have seen, and some things could not be translated from one language to the next---not easily, at least. Sandy regretted this, sometimes, because it was a large weight to carry the memory of an age alone; yet there were many things, a great many things, that he could not say when the language of the stars failed him.

Nonetheless, perhaps the Man had seen the language in his studies. Sandy crumpled one hand and flicked his fingers, and the sand overhead arched into a circular, complex shape.

The Moon simply gazed down at it for a long moment before tucking itself behind a slip of cloud.

Sandy shook his head, letting the sand dissipate. He'd thought so. Too young to remember the star-script. Well, he'd answered the question, even if the Man in the Moon did not understand the answer, so he bounced down off the rooftop and gave himself a short, doglike shake to toss off the last of the argument's stress. Then he began to prepare for the night's work. 

Overhead, the Moon edged further into the cloud and waited.

\---

Say what they would, no one could say he had not fought.

Kozmotis Pitchiner had always fought the dark. As long as he'd had strength to draw steel, to wield blade's edge, to lift an arm, he'd fought the dark. He'd fought it, and crushed it, and conquered it. He'd made it his prisoner. 

He remembered little of the 'why'. He knew not why he'd fought, or who he'd fought for. For all he knew, there hadn't been anyone. (Some piece of him said there had been someone. Someone precious, someone small. It didn't matter now.) He had no idea when the fighting had taken place in the grander scheme of things; the start of it, the length of it, none of that was available to be pondered. The past was a fog too thick to navigate or comprehend, but then, why navigate the past when there were richer waters to cut through? All he knew now was that he'd always fought the dark.

And when it had bitten back, lashing out in the sublime fury of the once-chained, he'd conquered it again; when it had poured into him, a torrential cacophony of fury and distress, he'd stabbed at it in his own heart. This time he'd snapped it, cracked its spiteful spine. He'd bent it under his boot and made it his slave. He'd wrought it into steel, formed it for a blade, and swung it natural as his arm. He'd made it his own. It had sung for him, the perfect silent whistle of a shadow cutting across a dim hallway. 

So it really should have come of less of a surprise when the darkness, sensing weakness in him---sensing, for the first time in many years, the first blinking awareness of a fear stirred hostile and sensate by the thought of loneliness perpetuated---fought back.

He almost pulled himself out of it. As he was hauled downwards, fingertips scrabbling at earth, nails breaking on roots and stone, he almost recovered himself. Calmness was the key to recovery, he knew that. He almost breached the surface of resilience.

Something screamed in his ear, high and feminine and fatally terrified, and he was pulled under again.

They dragged him down so fast, so deep, the pressure built like a cooker until it was crushing in on every inch of him as heavily as steel. He vomited, black acid and oily bile billowing from his lips; in the crushing swirl of pressure the acid flowed back into his face, sucking into his nose, splattering in his lungs. He could feel it burning there, eating away at him from the inside, and the terrific ache of it was almost enough to drown out the screams so he clung to it, focused on the burning.

Jibbering teeth chewed into his arms, gnawing down on ligaments, biting deeper and deeper until they had found the joints of him, teeth piercing into his elbows and knees like needles. The sockets of his hips groaned, but did not crack. He couldn't feel his fingers. He thought, distantly, that they must be bleeding, for he could feel the trickle of blood on the backs of his hands. It itched.

Something massive and muleish, stocky and muscle-bound, trampled its cousins down until it could rear over him, wide hoofs chomping at the air; he stared up at it, awaiting the moment those knife-sharp hooves would crash down on his head, shaving skin from bone, slicing his face from his skull. He was, it dawned upon him, too scared to be scared anymore.

The nightmare's hooves beat the air an inch from his eyes, but it did not strike. Instead it came back down to earth---if there was earth, here, perhaps it landed on solid obsidian, for all the glass-sharp clatter it made---with a cracking and a pawing, and its massive head bowed to snort brimstone nostrils at his temple.

Its eyes glowed golden, like the open mouth of a furnace. Pitch found himself staring at them, drawn inwards towards their rippling heat. The glow of it seemed vaguely familiar, yet the thought of reaching out was somehow terrifying when he had thought even terror had numbed itself out.

The massive head turned, and then the golden eye was level with his own, allowing him to stare into the heart of some alien sun. He couldn't move. For a moment, neither did the nightmare. Gaze to gaze they stayed, and Pitch thought almost that there was something deep in the heart of that blazing stare, something small and pearl-smooth and waiting to be reached in for and taken.

Then the horse shied, hooves lashing upwards in sudden fury, and the blows shattered his body with the pain.

\---

The marks of the nightmares were not hard to find. He had learned about them, once, a very long time ago in a classroom the subjects of which a human could likely neither fully imagine or comprehend; he remembered the illuminated images on the wall, great glowing traces on blackened wood, turgidly curved iron. One image had stayed with him despite the wide eraser of time: on a cold mountain range an ugly smear of black, a strange alien thing that seemed to have collided, recoiled, and then frozen in the frigid air before it could fully withdraw from the cliff face. Sandy still remembered the details clearly: the charcoal arc, peeling violently away from the rocky mountainside, its length forever frozen in a vicious reaction to the cold. It had, perhaps, been a Nightmare Pirate fallen from a dark ship cruising higher up. No one had wanted to unfreeze it and find out. 

Sandy had stared at the image for a long time, and forgotten to take any notes. After the lesson he'd approached the professor about the image. She had been unable to tell him where it was taken, or how long ago it had been sent to the university. This had bothered him tremendously, and he'd continued to think about it, occasionally, for many years after; years in which he earned his piloting license, and oversaw the construction of his star, and began his rounds as a wishing pilot. He'd thought about it right up until the first evening flight that he saw a black sail cresting over the horizon. He'd even thought about it, briefly, as he watched the first jibbering silhouettes rise at the railings of the oncoming ship.

Then the pirate cruiser had swept down, colliding with a passing freighter, and the shadows had dived down like swallows from cliffsides, swooping onto the freighter's wide decks and bursting on impact into long, lancing, spiky-limbed things. They had sprouted things, arms and knives and teeth and eyes and heads, and from his vantage point higher in the sky, Sandy had seen them go to work.

He did not think about that image again.

Even now, as he picked out the light serpentine drags in the dust that marked the passing of nightmare strands, he squashed the faint ghost of the image that rose unbidden to his mind. Despite his refusal, it continued to haunt him as he went deeper into the woods: the agonized peel away from the mountainside, the jagged slashes of ashen grey and oil black that were doomed to splash back from the rock forever. As he drifted into the clearing, he swatted the memory down with the grim thought of what was to come. 

The clearing lay dormant, and dormant was the key word. It seemed to be holding itself still, like an animal in hibernation; as he looked around, the leaves on the trees were grey and sere, but few of them had fallen to the ground despite the lateness of the season. He was struck by the thought that perhaps they had not fallen for far too many seasons now.

In the center of the clearing, as he'd suspected, was the bed. What was left of the bed. One of the posts was gone; most of the supporting boards had vanished, dragged, he suspected, down the hole that gaped in the earth. Why, it could hardly be called a bed at all. It was just the remains you'd find in a junkyard somewhere, waiting to be burned or buried or forgotten.

Near the edges of the hole, the earth was torn up; the upheaval of the ground seemed alien in the otherwise still clearing, and the earth itself was richly brown where it had been razed, as if it had forgotten how to deal with an injury. Here, too, were the marks of the nightmares; branches scattered on the ground had been broken down, and dry weeds had snapped off cleanly at the root. Closer to the bed there were splinters of chewed wood spat on the ground. Sandy bent slowly, plucking one up to roll it between his fingers. The grey saliva stung his fingertips; he dropped it with a sucked-in breath, and rubbed his hand quickly in the ashen dirt. The drips of spittle rolled into dusty crumbles, blackening when mixed with the earth. The sight made his stomach heave.

But he was not trained to run at the first swell of sea sickness, was he? Straightening, he brushed his hands off one last time, and turned to inspect the sun. It was just starting to become tangled in the highest branches; if he waited much longer, he'd have to retreat and return tomorrow. He could not risk going in too late. By midnight, the nightmares would be at their peak; he would be dropping into the bees' nest when it was already frantic. He had to go now, or not at all.

The Sandman tutted at his own unease, until it seemed small enough to be tutted over. Then he gathered what remained of his sand together, brushed a hand through his hair to ensure he was respectable---one should always make an attempt to be respectable, when stepping into the unknown---and, walking forward, he let himself float downwards into the dark.


	2. How To Be Invited In

They had let him go.

Perhaps he had died. The state he was in now could not in any polite sense be called ‘alive', not as such. The world was a black-and-grey illustration around him; he thought sometimes he could see the shades of nightmares passing by him, but they never seemed to move, only to be suddenly somewhere they had not been a moment before. His other senses---smell, touch---had abandoned him. He thought perhaps he was trying to move his fingers, but the lack of responding sensation or movement in his vision told him it was not so.

Death was a likely culprit. He could not rustle up the energy to be furious, only to feel a vast, prepossessed sense of sorrow that was inhabiting his body or whatever remained of it. A ghost, he managed to think. A specter, some ghoulish resentment left to linger endlessly in the bowels of the Earth.

His hearing was abruptly returned to him at the sharp, almost barked whinny of a mare, and then they were stamping all about him, sliding over and around and between each other like schooling fish, heads upturned, eyes wide. They were aroused by something overhead. Their tall ears flicked and flattened and flicked again in fearful curiosity.

They paid him no mind. He closed his eyes and waited to find out if he was dead.

\---

The Sandman had an awareness of Pitch's realm in the way a landlocked country had an awareness of the ocean: it existed, it was vast, it interlocked a multitude of places, and it wasn't something you'd bother to touch. He had listened patiently to Frost's theories on how Pitch seemed to have a network that sprawled through the Earth as widely as Bunnymund's tunnels, and yet the two managed to remain uncrossed ("except for a few times," he'd added, with shame sitting sharply in his eyes like a half-hidden chip of diamond.) 

Sandy had never understood his confusion. Pitch's tunnels worked the way all nightmare architecture worked: it took physical form when necessary, retreated to nothing but darkness when it wanted. That was the power of fear. It was not often corporal. As long as some deep, subconscious part of you knew it could become physical, it rarely needed to.

This meant navigating Pitch's realm was, pardon his pun, a nightmare. Just as Sandy's many-formed island was an extension of himself, curling tentacles of dream-sand expanding and contracting in the rhythmic breath of slumber, so Pitch's kingdom was an extension of him, low corridors and vaulting ceilings coming oppressively close or veering away suddenly like a startled horse, leaving you alone and small and afraid. Like Pitch, the hallways kinked in at all the wrong places, wrapped around themselves until they seemed to have forgotten where they were meant to go; like Pitch, the realm had the sense of possessing a meaning once, sculpted buttresses and arched doors suggesting lofty goals, towering ambitions; like Pitch, the realm had lost the map to those goals long ago. Now it was merely a maze, a tangled knot of corridors and sudden pitfalls for a wanderer to stumble through or break on.

Normally, Sandy knew, he'd have to wander these halls for hours as a matter of principle. They would spin him around until he was unsure of the way out, loop him back in seemingly endless ways until every hallway seemed familiar, but only in ways he could not decipher or use, and he'd have to continue on regardless. He would have to trek for hours, maybe days if Pitch was in that kind of mood, until suddenly there would come a chill upon his skin and there, exactly the moment the Nightmare King wanted and not one less, he'd stumble upon a vast and open room. Pitch Black would be lounging carelessly on a throne stabbed together by sharpened rock, and his narrowed eyes would be terribly amused. _'Just happened to be passing by, did you, Sandman?'_

In times past, Pitch's iron grip on his realm's shape-shifting had driven Sandy to cloudlike heights of frustration. When approaching Pitch, the Sandman was rarely in a good mood to begin with; to be re-routed about for some voyeur’s amusement was a perfect way to fan the flames of his normally low-burning temper. Now Sandy would have gladly traded his patience for another round of Pitch's controlled guidance. He knew the Nightmare King was somewhere inside---perhaps 'knew' was a strong word, but he preferred it, it suggested certainty of an option that was far more appealing than the others available---but without the controlling hand of its master, the realm was not shunting him down the correct hallways. Instead it was repeating itself, sending him down a dozen corridors he recognized in detail, forgetting to change any aspect of doorways he was beginning to know by heart. It was circling, unsure of what it was meant to do and rebuffing his attempts at progress only through instinctual self-preservation.

Stumbling over the same hidden step he'd stumbled over the last four times he'd stepped through that archway, Sandy finally lost his temper. Arms thrown out for balance, he glared at the onyx walls. Fine. The nice way obviously wasn't working. Well, he could always improvise. As he pushed his sleeves up and cracked his knuckles, he almost thought he could feel the walls around him bowing outward slightly, as if the very place itself was trying to withdraw, suspicious of him; he didn't blame it. He wasn't feeling very nice now. If Pitch Black could will this place to do his bidding, why couldn't he? He'd broken his share of wild nightmares in his time. This was just a much, much bigger one. For certain definitions of the word 'nightmare'. And 'big'.

Mouth set, he bent to one knee and rested his hands on the floor. He nearly withdrew them again; it was cold on his palms, almost painfully so, as if the stones underfoot were trying to repel his touch. Ignoring the hurt, he flattened his hands down until he could feel the hardness along every inch of his open hands, his fingertips whitening with the pressure. The chill soaked into his fingers, snapping at the joints, and he winced.

 _'Take me to Pitch,'_ he told it, in the only way he could think to. He tried to say the words through his hands, the way he'd speak to nightmares through a pressed palm or stroking fingertips: _'Easy, easy, my dear thing. Easy. Breathe with me.'_

It was a gentle tone of voice, and the stonework did not absorb and conduct it the way nightmares did. His communication was rebuffed almost entirely, frozen at its source; he gritted his teeth and tried again. _'Take me to Pitch!'_ Nothing stirred under his hands. The cold gnawed at his bones, fine icicle teeth wrapping around each joint to dig in deep and grind. Frustrated, he slapped one hand against the floor, then pressed down harder, putting his own weight down until the heels of his hands were aching with it. _'I am here to save him! Take me to your lord!'_

The cold lashed out, lancing up his arms, sending shocks of freezing pain so high there was a moment he thought his elbows had shattered. Hissing, he withdrew his hands, folding them up painfully and tucking them under the folds of his shirt. When they made contact with his stomach he shuddered, but did not withdraw them, keeping them close to himself until the pain began to ebb.

He did not know how else to speak to this place. While it sensed him easily, the brain of it had been cut away, and it was lashing out thoughtlessly. Without Pitch's guiding mind, he could not communicate with it. Frustrated, the Sandman straightened up. Without something that understood him, how could he ever find---

Realization dawned on him, and he withdrew his arms hurriedly. How stupid could he be? Of course there was something that understood him here. He didn't have to find it. He had to force it to find him. That was where he'd gone wrong.

Turning, Sandy headed back the way he'd come. Not that direction mattered here, but it was a sign of his intent to retreat; he combined it with a softened posture, slumped shoulders, dimmed light. Sure enough, it was only moments before the realm began to sense his intention to leave, and the next turn in the tunnel ended in a door.

He opened it and floated up past the ladder on the other side. As he broke the surface, fresh air sweeping over the pit he'd exited from, he inhaled so deeply his lungs hurt. Overhead, the last stars were silently shutting off their lights. He'd wandered through Pitch's realm in the darkest part of night, and not once had anything stepped to him. The realm was _afraid_.

Again, he berated himself for not getting it earlier. Of course the place was defending against him; Pitch Black was injured, and so his kingdom was injured too, fearful of intruders. Of course his approach would be rebuffed. His mistake had been in thinking he should be the hunter in the first place. Sandy looked down at the pit. Already it was small, too small to fit even a ladder, much more him rising up out of the ground; it seemed a snake-hole, an obscured pit that led into some tiny den in the dark. Yes, the realm would not open easily before him. Not while he was a threat.

Sandy looked up at the sky. The stars were all abed here, but not elsewhere; somewhere always the sun was setting, somewhere always the shadows were growing long. Somewhere there was always work to be done. Sandy could have spent a thousand lifetimes chasing the sun in an endless journey around the Earth if he'd been foolish enough to try it. He wasn't. One can only spin so many dreams before the well's dry. He knew to stop and rest, to refresh himself with wonder (North's workshop, overflowing with creativity, with ideas) and hope (Bunnymund's warren, warm and vivid green and forever chattering with the sounds of new beginnings) and memories (Toothiana's palace, precious and jewel-bright, singing with a thousand voices of the Earth and all its most beautiful moments, brilliant pearls of time kept close) and fun (Jack's sky, his streets, his sand, his anywhere---any place, any time, any home or hearth or empty highway a place to find joy, to remember the all-healing power of laughter.) As long as he stopped every night, as long as he took the time to recover, he would never grow dim. He would burn as brightly as any star.

As long as he stopped every night.

Sand gathered under him and lifted him upwards, led him higher until he was above the clouds, until he could see, miles and miles away, the horizon still caught in the richer hues of night. He didn't bother with a construct, something self-fueling and easily maintained; he simply sent his own cloud shooting towards the west, headed for the night. Even as he traveled he drew out more sand to enlarge the cloud, to let the dreamsand stir itself up to active creation. There would be many vivid dreams tonight, dreams that were intricate and complex and almost too-focused. There would be many vivid dreams in a night that would last for far too long, for it would be chased as long as it could be, until the last grains of his cloud were dimming, until the last dreams from his hands were weakened even as they trickled through the air. It would be a night he kept pace with until there was not enough strength in him to keep pace.

The Sandman tucked his hands into his sleeves, locking his fingers about his wrists. Bowing against the chilly night air, he dragged a shawl of sand up over his shoulders, angling it to protect most of himself from the breeze; then he shivered, fingertips rubbing at aching wrists. He still felt cold.

\---

Somehow he'd rolled over. He wasn't sure how it had happened. He hadn't felt the drag of motion on his body, yet here he was looking at the ceiling. Perhaps his spirit was escaping his body?

A sound, something like a giggle, whispered briefly out of his lips. Bright flecks of light pierced him from various corners of the room, but after a moment they dimmed again, nightmares lowering their heads or returning to their restless pacing. He wasn't afraid. They'd shown no sign of aggression towards him once he'd stopped fighting back. He supposed they'd finish him off when he tried to escape, but for now, he didn't have the strength to try, so there wasn't really a problem.

He knew now he was very much still alive. He was almost amused by the confusion of his first hours after the attack, when he had been so weakened, so thin, his mind had drifted on half-sane thoughts of being a ghost; he would laugh at his own foolishness if he had the lung-strength to laugh. As it was, he breathed out another half-giggle. Again the sound drew attention, but again it was removed. He had no power here anymore. Even the shadow-things were moving without him; he could see the dark spirits mingling with the nightmares, feeble nightmarish things that had been under his control since a time he could no longer clearly recollect, since a time when he had come, he suspected, from somewhere among the stars. They had grown thin over the years, quieter than they'd once been, but they had always followed him to the word. Now they wandered freely about the cavern, clambering over his things, digging through his books, making cautious acquaintance with the nightmares. In fact, he realized with mild surprise, the entire place was swarming with them---black shadows breathing on the walls, skulking on the bookshelves, climbing on the ceiling like four-legged spiders. He stared upwards. Some of them, skeletal, baby-faced, milky-eyed, stared back.

Then the air changed. As one the masses of shadows and nightmare-things churned to life, heads lifting, eyes moving about, jagged mouths parting over questioning, angry sounds. The nightmares were prancing nervously like horses scenting a predator; the shadows on the walls and ceiling began to swarm, flowing in distressed patterns. Gradually, however, he saw the consciousness start to shift. The sounds became curious. The nightmares began to snort at the edges of the cavern, searching. The shadow-things squealed and gibbered among themselves, and their eyes began to turn bright with desire.

Trapped in all of it, Pitch thought, distantly, that he wished they'd at least dropped him on his throne instead of the middle of the damn floor.

It was so...so dreadfully _disrespectful._

\---

The fearlings, that was it. He'd been stupid enough to think of them as one big mass, as if The Dark itself had somehow taken form and swallowed Pitch Black up, and it was his job to go crash through a bunch of hallways and save the day. Stupid. Stupid of him. The fearlings were the key. He should have remembered there were many kinds of shadows under Pitch's hand.

There was more than simply fear-built wall and frightened stone down there. Somewhere in those halls, chomping their hungry teeth, circling and masterless and confused, were nightmares. Not the nightmares of the old world, shrieking spirits of doomed men and half-destroyed children; malevolent shades of dead things and living grudges; mindless killers and destroyers and devourers. Not the shades, the nightmare-things, the shadow-men that crawled in the dark to wait for their chance to lunge.

No, these were new nightmares, new beasts coaxed lovingly to life under Pitch Black's hands; beasts delicate and terrible and hungry, that had thrown off their rider not long after he'd given them the bit. These were nightmares created by Pitch's own hand, shaped by him with tender care.

Shaped out of something that did not belong to him.

Something that would respond far more readily to a Sandman than shadow or stone. Stumbling through the dark, he cursed himself again for not thinking of this sooner. Storming through the front gates like that, all fearsome light and defiance---that was a soldier's thinking, a warrior's thinking. Sandy had not been a warrior. He'd been a pilot---a damn good one, thank you---and he'd been taught the value of subtlety, of faking your opponent out by using just one twist of a deft hand to turn the tables after you'd led them astray. Well, supposedly he'd been taught that. Didn't seem to have stuck with him if he'd thought barging in with whips out was a good plan, did it?

All he could do now was hope he'd picked up on the right idea soon enough, and that the nightmares hadn't yet torn Pitch apart.

His right leg gave, and he threw his weight sideways, catching himself against the wall instead of tumbling onto his face; his left ankle stung where he'd caught himself on it, but it didn't hurt enough to have been twisted. Tentatively he tried his weight on it, and gave a sigh of relief when it held. He'd been in the sky for---he didn't know how long---it was one blur of time still clinging to his brain, an unending desperate night of dreams overworked to feverish levels of color and detail, dreamsand spun in explosive arcs of energy until he was too tired to look for another stirring mind; until even walking down this dim hallway seemed to be almost asking too much.

The burst of mild fear when he'd started to fall was mellow, but he held on to the after-anxiety, looped it in his head, kept his breathing shallow and fast. The last wasn't hard to do, not with what strength he had left. Exhaustion was shadowing his steps, threatening to swallow him like a cloak if he left himself rest a moment too long, and he used that to ramp up his sense of time running out; _'too late,'_ he chanted in his head, _'you'll be too late, too late, too late,'_ and he felt his pulse beat faster on its own.

The ankle still burned. He put his full weight on it with every other step, making sure the sting of it didn't have a chance to die down; the underlying buzz of pain fed his already jangling nerves, and while it wasn't excessive, it was enough to keep him unbalanced and anxious. As he walked he kept free of the walls, reminding himself he couldn't catch the next stumble. Anything to keep him nervous. Anything to dispel the blanket of calm he'd once been trained to keep as tightly about him as his own skin.

Nervousness was how they scented you. Fear, yes, fear was what they hunted for, but often you weren't afraid before they found you: you were nervous, anxious as you proceeded through the dark, your attempts to remain calm betrayed by the little waves of anxiety that would rise above them with every straying thought or sound. Fearlings scented an unquiet person the way sharks scented blood. And Sandy, trailing pain, trailing worry, trailing exhaustion, was an open wound.

The realm opened up before him, letting him wander freely through rooms and caverns he'd never seen before; it was suspicious of him, he knew, but in his current state---he could barely light enough space to see the next step---it was not fearful of him. Indeed, in some of the darker hallways where the shadows pressed in closely, he was almost afraid of being blotted out. He forced himself to linger in those claustrophobic places, waiting in the darkness until his thoughts began to jumble, his fingers began to scrabble for stone. He only let himself move on once he was almost gasping, once he felt as if his lungs had gone too tight to breathe.

He had just found another room, a beautiful open hall with glass-smooth floors and a tiered dais, when he finally heard the tell-tale brush of shadowy limbs.

It was like wet velvet trailing on pavement or a dead branch dipping into a creek. Almost soundless, almost formless: a vague susurrus suggestion without source, something that came from all about you as if it were only in your head. It was meant to panic, to make the prey suspicious but not clear-minded. Sandy, however, did not panic. He simply drew himself up and waited.

Slowly, irrevocably, they slid in from an empty doorway. In ragged patches they came, crawling up the walls, slicking onto the floor, sidling away on the wall. Some two-dimensional, some palpable and fully formed, some merely the suggestion of a shadow in the corner of your eye: around seven of them, he guessed, though there were always more than you thought, so that made it closer to a dozen. And there, coming through the doorway, eye sockets glowing like coals, nostrils flaring in hostile snorts---he grinned. Two nightmares.

The shadows did not approach, sticking closely to the walls. They were ancient, he guessed, perhaps almost ancient as him, and they were wise; they were not easily fooled by his temporary weariness. They recognized his age, and some animal part of them must have recognized the strength needed to reach it. He was not concerned by this. The nightmares were young yet, and a catastrophic mix of elements in his favor: they were formed from pride, made with a bent towards aggression, and they were fresh from the rebellion against their former master. They were young, and violent, and presently throbbing with the heady blood of victory. They would not fear him now.

He opened his hand and let sand uncurl from his palm, unraveling into a solid length on the floor; at the sight of the whip the shadows veered back, and even the nightmares stopped in their tracks, memories warring within them. They had overwhelmed such weapons before, but they had also seen allies overwhelmed. Sandy let the whip lay dormant, and crouched on one knee. Hooding his eyes, he waited.

Ignorant of the wiser shadows' wariness, the nightmares trotted forward and then back, heads bowing in snuffling inspection, eyes locked always on him; very soon they grew bolder, and approached him with quick-lifted hooves, as if to be still even for caution was not comfortable to their nature. The Sandman did not move. His muscles urged him to leap forward, to slash out, to defend; he trained down his instincts, snapping for them to behave. You had to let the enemy make the wrong move. With the speed and stealth the nightmare ships had, making the first move was rarely the successful one; you had to let them set their course, and then you ruined it for them when they least expected you to pull free and turn sharply to the side---

The closer of the mares darted forward, teeth bared, eyes blazing, and her too-sharp teeth snapped five inches from his face. He flinched hard, but his hand stayed down; the other mare, seeing the flinch, lunged too, and that was when his whip lashed out.

The golden rope locked around her neck, and he hauled on that rope like it was a lifeline. For a moment everything was opposing forces and clattering hooves as the nightmare reared, screaming in startled fury; then abruptly he stopped grounding her, throwing himself forward and up instead. The sudden shift of strength nearly threw her down, she was pulling so hard; instead she staggered, regained her balance, and reared again.

It didn't work. He'd leaped onto her back, and his hands were locked on the rope about her neck. The fierce bucking did not unseat him.

She screamed, bucked one last time, and then bolted. His eyes widened when he saw her design---the square door-jamb of stone. He ducked just low enough to avoid being brained on it. They clattered down the hallway, the other nightmare running close behind in confused anger.

He set to work. He knew he had only moments before the nightmare grazed close enough to an angled wall or hanging stalactite to unseat him or, worse, to gouge out his _holy shit._

He straightened, glancing back at the row of spikes along the low-hanging ceiling she'd just tried to peel him open with, and then he looked down again. First he worked his left hand free---feeling him loosen his hold, she skidded to a halt and began to buck again, but he curled up against her neck and thought barnacle thoughts until she gave up and returned to her running. He gathered up the free-trailing length of the whip to avoid a trip-up that would end poorly for both of them. Then he placed that hand on her neck, stood up as much as he dared with her current breakneck pace, and murmured in her ear in a language no one on Earth had ever heard.

_'Take me to Pitch Black.'_

For a dreamlike moment, her pace slowed. Confused, she hit a canter, then a trot, moving now more out of unconscious panic than intent; the words caught in her ears as meaningless noise, but the underlying rhythm of them, the deep planet-slow vibrations at which they echoed, hummed against chords of star-stuff her body recognized on an almost cellular level. Somewhere deep inside her, something made an answering sound. 

She came to a halt, tail swishing in nervous twitches, head dipping and then lifting up in confusion. Sandy did not speak to her again; her attention was enough. Around them, the shadows drifted, watching with great suspicion; the other nightmare lingered close, making small questioning snorts. Beneath his thighs Sandy felt his ride give one barrel-deep shuddering breath.

Loosening the death-grip he'd kept on the rope, he pressed both hands to her broad shoulders. This time he said it with his hands, letting the language flow through him and into her; there was no sound for her to hear, but the meaning of it would resonate, he hoped, would catch on some faint yellow memory of sun-bathed sands.

_'Take me to Pitch Black!'_

Her ears flicked uncertainly, and he watched with bated breath. _'Please,'_ he chanted in his head. _'Please, please, please.'_

She snorted, and he barely had time to grab the rope again, warned by the bunching of her massive shoulders, before she bolted once more. The shadows swirled up in a shrieking storm, and the other mare whinnied; she squealed back, an answering cry, and they joined to run shoulder to shoulder.

But her nose was pointed straight for a goal she'd not had before, and as Sandy crouched low on her neck again, he knew some part of her had accepted the command.


	3. With Tongue And Teeth

The shadows were rivuleting over the walls and each other; he wondered what had driven them to their crazed state, but in his current weakness he could barely connect with them, much more feel through their senses. The most he could get was a weak broadcast of excitement, a consistent hum of _'something's coming.'_ He almost smiled. Unless he was vastly off his guess, he could imagine what.

He'd been foolish to think this latest gambit would be forgotten like a child's prank. Of course they'd come after him. Sanderson at the lead, he decided, likely the source of the flustered shadows; it was a damned pity his mouth wasn't working very well, because what he'd have given to turn to look at them as they entered, to offer that overstuffed puffball a sneer. _'Just happened to be passing by, did you, Sandman?'_

His lips felt stretched, cracking like ice. He wondered if they'd tried to smile. He didn't think they'd succeeded; all he felt was that his face itched.

Near one of the entryways, the nightmares began to stamp and snort; the shadows withdrew from the door, and the mares circled, curious and confused. The show was beginning, then! Pitch cursed in his head once more at whichever shadow had seen fit to drop him here like a doll. If they'd at least had the cruel humor to ravage him on his throne, he could have pretended he'd gotten up there on his own when the Guardians came to---whatever they were going to do. Lock him up again somewhere. The agony of imprisonment was too vast to comprehend with the little amount of energy he had now, so the thought only made him smile. His lips itched again.

Something was moving near the entrance---he saw something in the shadows, shifting forms, a slight glow---but there was nothing bright, nothing noisy, no voices echoing out or crying his name. He tried to lift his head, but the muscles of his neck strained at the attempt; curious now, and more than a little unsettled, he let his cheek hit the floor again and simply stared.

Hooves danced on the cold stone as a nightmare came through the doorway, her agitated prancing a sign of confusion and fear; and on her back, barely visible in the dim light, barely providing his own illumination---

Pitch Black said something, but from his scream-worn throat it was merely a hiss on the cavern's air. "Ssssan..."

It was enough. The nightmare's ears pricked, and she took a few more nervous steps towards him before stopping certainly, hooves planted in defiance. She was done with her confusion. He recognized the stubborn set of her high head. The angle of her made it hard for him to see the tiny bundle on her back, but then it shifted, and---and it rolled off her, not like a ball but an unraveling cloth, tumbling from her back to hit the floor and remain where it had fallen. Faint glittering light trailed where it had moved through the air.

Freed from her burden, the nightmare gave one tremendous shake and then bolted back the way she'd come, ears flat to her skull and hooves sending up sparks. A few nightmares reeled as if to go after her; then they settled, and joined the rest of the dark room in watching the pile of half-light on the floor.

"Ssss...sssand," Pitch managed this time, and then he was shocked to hear his own voice trickle out of him loud enough to catch on some of the hardest surfaces of the room, bouncing back in small echoes of his broken laugh. "Sandy!"

On the floor, the ragged bundle shifted, then sat up. The Sandman looked---well, Pitch Black hadn't seen him look this unfortunate for many a year. His colors had faded, gone from sunny copper and vivid forsythia and burnished gold to cracked marble, dying daffodil, forgotten parchment. The sparkle of his skin had turned oily and dull. At the edges of him, where dream sand clung to his wrists and his dancer's tiny feet, the sand was crumbling away like broken plaster. His golden hair, with strands that usually curled at his temples and drifted in windless air like seaweed dreaming in the deeps, was tangled and a dirty mud-blond. His eyes were sunken in his pale face.

Again, he was not sure how he did it. A moment ago he had been unable to say his own name. Yet there it came, a sound familiar and amused even if it was cracked over his broken throat: "Sanderson, you look _terrible_."

The Sandman shot him a look that suggested all the impolite gestures his hands couldn't make, as they were too busy gathering up his loose robes and pushing him upright. He wobbled like some child's drunken toy, but seemed to be regaining his composure, and he rushed to Pitch's side. Well, rushed was a kind word for it. He hobbled quickly. Pitch's mouth itched again.

"So eager," he said, but he'd tried too much too quick, and his throat gave out; Sandy shot him another mean look but then busied himself with looking Pitch over, hands hovering over Pitch's lean body as if that could somehow give him more information. His hands, Pitch saw, were shaky.

"What," he said, and then waited impatiently for his body to count down to his next allotment of breath and vocal chord strength, "the hell happened to you?"

He didn't have to ask. He recognized the signs: the Sandman had worked himself down to wick's end, his candle burned out. Pitch had been around the globe a couple times in his life, and he knew how the others worked. He knew Sandy needed rest---his own particular kind of rest, granted, but still rest---just like anyone else. What he didn't know now was why Sandy hadn't gotten it, or why, when the Sandman clearly needed nothing more than to go somewhere pleasant and absorb some good energy, he'd instead come down here where the fearful shadows were probably actively leeching away what little strength he had left.

Ah. That thought had caught on an edge of his mind, like a scrap of cloth finding the crook of a rock mid-stream; he might be on the verge of languishing away, his essence stretched almost too thin to be retained, but instinct was stronger than ever. He followed the scent sharper than a bloodhound, and found results: fears simmering at the corners of Sandy's mind, tiny worries clustered there. Yes, the shadows were absorbing his energy. Sandy hadn't been this dim when he'd entered Pitch’s realm. Pitch dug deeper, plucking the little fearful worries out of the air like unexpected fruit in a wintry orchard; they were small, but luscious, like ripened cherries, and though they provided little sustenance they were something to his ravaged frame, and something more to his almost extinguished spirit. Sandy hadn't foreseen how quickly the darkness would sap him! He'd estimated poorly, forgotten it would be more vicious, more wild, without Pitch's restraining hand. He'd potentially underestimated too much! Yes, he was fearful of the shadows around them now, fearful not of what one---or even many---might try to attempt in an immediate fight, but what might happen to him now if he remained too long, if he did not escape very soon, if he perchance lost his way and the darkness continued to quietly seep away his light...

The momentary relief of these fear-bites was stopped when Pitch ran up against another question, one that he could not let the Sandman leave unanswered like the last. "Wait," he said, finding his voice slightly more willing to cooperate now that he'd breathed in those subtle but very real worries. "Why are you here alone, and why did you enter so weak?"

The Sandman's worried examination of his body halted; hands hovering, eyes still, the star did not immediately answer. Pitch frowned---regretting, immediately, having done so, for it made his mouth hurt---but was for once forced to be patient with the incorrigible dream-weaver; a demand for quickness was not a worthwhile use of his precious word count.

The other spirit shook his head, a weak attempt at denial, but Pitch's raised eyebrow was all that was needed to communicate between a set of immortals who had spent many centuries communicating (even if that 'communicating' was often via physical blows, or lots of shouting and indecent gestures.) It reminded Sandy that Pitch could be very unhelpful unless he got what he wanted, and in the current situation, they both knew damn well that Pitch could wait out Sandy a lot more easily than Sandy could wait out Pitch.

The Sandman's shoulders buckled, and he gestured at Pitch's prone form.

Pitch waited; when nothing more was forthcoming, he spoke. "Yes. And?" Sandy shook his head. A small suspicion began to bloom open in Pitch's mind. "What does it matter to you? Where are the others?"

Again, a shake of the head, and a gesture at Pitch's body. He barely caught himself before frowning. "What about it? I'm alive. Lock me up. Chain me to some post somewhere, light me up like it's November, why don't you." He heard the slight tinge of hysteria rising on his own voice, and it made him hate the Sandman's worried look even more. "Get out," he said, even though his voice was starting to scratch into his throat with long claws. "Get out. Get out, get out _get out get_ \---"

It died in him, a squawked cry, and even though he was panting for air he suddenly didn't have enough. The pain was harsh, but the shout had made him light-headed, and the pain came through only in fuzzy waves; his chest felt as if it couldn't get enough air in it, not nearly enough, and the dizziness increased. In the blur the world had become, he could see Sandy's worried face.

"Get," he tried to say, but it came out as a breathless hiss. The Sandman didn't bother shaking his head this time; he simply shifted, moving closer to Pitch's head, and then his small arms were sliding under and the world tipped sideways.

Pitch almost screamed, not from sorrow or fear or even anger, but from the way his world was beginning to spiral so uncontrollably; not visually, though his eyes seemed to have lost their focus, but internally, in his chest, his lungs, his bones. The very marrow of him seemed to be growing too weighty to exist inside, as if it was being dragged towards the center of the Earth with some uncertain gravity. Everything in him was pulling to fall out or float away. Soul-deep vertigo was buzzing in his skull, wrenching at his stomach. He gasped, half hiccuping over the noise, and for a moment he thought tears were going to burn his eyes.

Dry yellow was filling one half of his vision, like broken china, aged bone. He tried to shift; he couldn't, because something was holding him down. He froze, trying desperately to focus on his body enough to figure out what was happening, but something was growing in him: the panic, the faint but rapidly multiplying facets of panic. Somewhere, deep inside him, he knew what was happening.

His form was trying to pull apart. He didn't have enough fear to keep himself together.

He tried to say the Guardian's name. What for, he wasn't certain: to plead for a delay? To demand a mercy-killing? To curse him? He couldn't remember. All he knew was that the star-pilot was the only thing left in this cavern that could process his words; he struggled to use them, to force them from where they were battering at his skull. It was no use. His throat had shut down on him at last.

Hope dwindling inside him, he went limp. The hunger in him was too all-encompassing to work with now, a faceless need that sang through every cell, a desire too great, too overpowering, to allow his mind to think of anything else. Fear. He needed fear. He was going to die. He was going to die, and he couldn't even rage against it, couldn't even fight the oncoming claws of death, he could only think of how hungry he was, of how desperately he needed to feed---

Close to his face, almost close enough to reach, he could smell something alive. Something living, with little fears, with little needs, with little worries that were far too small to save him now. There was even something bigger in that body, something stronger, a very active and surging fear, one that he could perhaps sustain himself with for a few moments, but not much longer, no, not large enough, not enough at all---

He could not move his body. His hands did not respond. Perhaps they'd already dissipated. All he could do, all he could think to do, was bare his teeth and bite at the air.

\---

He'd gathered the former Nightmare King up into his arms, but it hadn't helped. If anything, it had made it worse. Even as he watched Pitch's body was growing more intangible, the surface of the ground he lay on starting to show through his legs, his hands. Sandy could feel panic smashing fists against the doors of his self-control. His mind was a frantic mantra of denial. Still, he remained calm; at his back, overhead, all around them, a sea of shadows was waiting. If he let his calmness slip now, if he gave them that one moment of terror they needed to claw into, they would leap upon him, and then they'd both be damned.

He needed to feed Pitch, needed to feed him _now_. He couldn't let his fears go fully; the shadows would consume what light he had left in far too short a time, long before he'd given Pitch enough to survive on. The shadow-men would likely devour whatever he had left to give anyway, leaving Pitch to starve and die alone on the floor, slowly dwindling out like a guttering candle, even as two feet away Sandy was stripped to the bone, his last cries the only sound the Earth would remember him for---

 _'Stop!'_ Sandy dug his teeth into his own lip until he felt canine puncture flesh, coppery salt welling up on his tongue; the pain needled at his singing nerves, but it cut short the cycle of panic that had started to rise. The hissing shift of shadows was growing noisy over his nervousness, a perpetual shifting around him now like the buzzing of a hive. He bent over Pitch and tried not to hear it.

In his arms, the spirit was turning an ugly thin grey, even his clothes starting to turn intangible. For one crazed moment Sandy considered throwing open the doors of his own fear, sending a last hail Mary pass to the Moon that he might provide enough of a meal to be sustainable for the other spirit before the shadows fell upon him---then he saw, squinting closely in the dim light, that Pitch's mouth was moving. For a moment he thought he was missing words, and he bent closer, trying to hear. Nothing shifted the air. Tilting his head, he tried desperately to lip-read.

They weren't words. Pitch was trying to chew.

Sandy had the strange sensation of his brain almost stopping as it tried to handle too much thought and barely-controlled terror at once: he knew that Pitch knew that they both knew what was wrong, and even at death's door he doubted Pitch would become stupid enough to think Sandy needed telling. Of course he knew Pitch needed to eat. Which meant Pitch was saying something---asking for something?---Sandy could provide. What was _happening_?

Almost without logical thought, he lifted his arm from where it had been looped around Pitch's waist; it wasn't until his hand was halfway to Pitch's mouth that he stopped, wondering why this was what seemed appropriate. He had nothing else, though, and so he continued, offering his wrist.

The spirit in his arms stiffened slightly; then Pitch's nostrils flared, and his glassy eyes, while they did not sharpen, began to move from the frozen stare they'd locked into. His lips parted again, and Sandy moved his wrist closer; against the thin skin there he felt first the slow scrape of teeth, then breath, then a slightly harder scrape. For a moment Pitch kept his teeth closed against Sandy's wrist. Then, lightly, Sandy felt the drag of a thin tongue.

Pitch's eyes shut, but his nostrils flared again and with something that must have been inhuman effort, he turned his head. Sandy felt the wash of disappointment, and it was almost enough to break the long-strained doors of his self-control; but then he saw that Pitch was straining where he'd laid his temple against Sandy's shoulder. Chin tipped up, eyes still closed, the spirit was straining desperately to lift his head higher, as if scent alone was leading him to something.

Sandy almost didn't get it. The terror was too heavy against his trained peace; the exhaustion was too strong against his staggering will. But he forced himself to move forward one more step, forced himself to widen his tired eyes and look again and focus only on Pitch and try desperately---for it was fast becoming close to impossible---to _think_. Pitch had almost taken his wrist. Blood? Flesh? Sorrow, corrupted sand? What did he want?

Wrist. Vein. Throat. Sandy stilled, stared at the drawn face leaning against his shoulder. Jugular. Perhaps. Worth a try. Trust Pitch Black at his jugular? Not now, not so weakened. What if this were all an elaborate ruse, a possum-play to get him close? In his arms, the Nightmare King’s chest rose in a rattling breath.

The Sandman’s face grew stern. It was his job to guard. Guard the children, yes, but he took the title of Guardian for a reason. Wishing stars didn't exist only for children. How could he face himself in years to come? With an almost noiseless sigh, Sandy folded up his legs, letting Pitch’s back rest more firmly against them; then, small fingers cradling tangled black hair, he tipped his head away and helped guide the open mouth to his throat.

For a moment there was no response, and hope quivered in him like the last flickers of a fire. But then he felt the warm press of a tongue, seeking, cautious; then the scrape of teeth again, once with a light brush, then with the drag of sharpened points. The scrape hurt, enough to make him suspect he was bleeding. Against his body he felt Pitch’s chest give one shuddering breath of relief, and then the tongue swabbed out again.

Sandy closed his eyes and waited.

\---

He didn't need to bite deep, not now. Just enough to break the skin. For the tiny gashes to open enough for blood leak out. For his saliva to work in.

The body did not pull away. Fear was seeping from it in little whispers, little bites of worry that soaked into him until he thought, dimly, that perhaps he could use his own hands again; he did not need to, though, not yet, and besides, he was so comfortable here. The body was holding him close, and it was warm, it filled his vision with the blurred color of book pages worn crisp by the years. When he breathed in, he thought he smelled ink, and the warm spice of sandalwood.

He continued to lave at the cuts, listening to the breathing above him grow quieter, grow calmer. Yes, that was all he needed. The arms holding him began to weaken, and then they grew tight again, hands locking together at the small of his back; they were trying painfully to stay strong, to keep him close. It took almost another minute before they loosened enough to let him go, and the release sent him falling back to the floor.

The cold stone jarred his body, but he was able to push himself upright, to get at least onto his hands and knees. At his side the body---Sandman, his fear-fed mind thought, it’s the Sandman---was sprawled out, arms wide, fingers still half-curled in the last miserable attempt to hold him despite the saliva working into the skin, into the blood, into the cells…

He crawled over, rested back on his heels. The Sandman’s eyes were hazy, and they wandered over Pitch’s face, searching him for an explanation they could not find the strength to demand. He licked his lips, catlike, and bowed over the Sandman’s prone form with a comforting smile.

“Temporary,” he found the energy to murmur. “Relax for me.”

The Sandman’s exhausted eyes closed, his reassurance somehow enough despite a hundred centuries of contention. Well, that was how it went. He rarely had reason to utilize the benumbing powers his shadows had given him, but when he did, he sent quiet praises to the darkest pits of the universe for their usefulness. Sanderson, little half-weight of a pilot, would be more susceptible to the sedative in his saliva than most of the star folk. Why, even now, sprawled open on the floor, his fingers were dragging quietly at the stones in the last desperate attempts to stay awake.

“Hush,” he whispered, and bent over the bared throat. “Hush, little star.”

\---

Everything was swimming back out of his grasp.

Even thoughts were distant, hard to catch at or keep. He wasn't sure why he was so comforted by Pitch’s reassuring words; still, he knew somehow---even if he didn’t know how he knew---that he would be all right. Pitch Black was here, was over him. That would be all right.

He was too calm. This wasn't right. Instincts were barely shifting in his brain, but training, pilot training, that never left you, that never failed you even when the boundaries of sanity did. His training was shouting at him, shaking at the drifting balloons of thought in his head, shrieking that he was being deceived. Pitch, Pitch was at fault. Pitch had done something, was doing something, and he had to wake up.

 _Like a vampire,_ his mind dredged up, muzzily. _Like Lugosi, but with more charm. A huldra. Old world born again._ The predator that seduced its victims, drowned them in the veils of comfort until they were too blind to see the razor's edge coming. Yet something else struggled noisily to disagree, a thought clawing its muffled way through the cotton-ball mess of his brain. Not a huldra, it insisted. Not like a huldra at all. Like something else!

He was open to the thought, open to it as he was open to anything, now; he felt like a sheet of silk laid out on the cutting table, waiting to be marked up and scissored apart. He felt like a hot cream puff feeling the first prick of the fork, ready to be split apart and squeezed full. He was spread open so widely he could have taken in a world. Yet the thought that was causing such a fuss failed to reach him, and he could feel it struggling in his mind, edges of it catching and tacking to the walls of his brain. The former Nightmare King was bowed so close he could feel each sovereign breath on his neck, and yet the only sense he felt with each puff was frigid cold. 

It was the cold, at last, that sawed through the heavy stuff in his mind, for he was startled enough by the lack of warmth to lift his eyelids and find Pitch's face. The man tilted his own head upwards as well, a reactionary glance, and as the thought stumbled gaspingly forward Sandy saw the slitted cut of the pupils.

_Not a huldra, a snake, a snake!---_

But the thought came too late to be anything but prophetic.

The knowledge burst into his brain like a wave, buffeted higher by the shock of the first piercing bite into his throat, and he almost figured out how to struggle. Then the lean hand was on his hip, coaxing him back down, stilling his panicking twitches, and he could not say no; he quieted, even as the incisors settled more comfortably into his flesh like daggers finding their sheaths, and together he and Pitch took gradually slowing breaths. At the place where the fangs met flesh, he felt the pointed prick of a tongue lave comfortingly over his skin.  
The king's hand drew gently up him, grazing cloth and skin until it found his chest, and it pressed lightly over his lungs until together they were breathing in calm harmony. The bite still hurt, but it was a dull ache, like an injury long carried. Sandy closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing. Something at the bite itself was starting to itch, and he felt his right hand twitch, once, with the snag of it on his nerves. Slightly, ever so slightly, the man over him tensed. His brain was hammering out a thought once more. It was so hard to think. A---a snake. Yes. Pitch bit like a snake. A snake, and that was important, too important, because---because---

Pitch's entire body hunched, jaw ratcheting tight, and deep in Sandy's neck the sunken fangs injected a torrent of venomous fear.

His spine lurched, limbs spasming so fast ligaments pulled and shrieked; the darkness over his joints snapped flat, pinning him, and under its hard bands his body could only rattle as the first wave of agony hit him. The pain seemed to bore a hole straight through his veins, like an acid shooting into him from his throat; he bucked, half-bitten keens of pain escaping his stubborn mouth, and at his side Pitch shifted the angle of his head and bit deeper. A fresh wave of poison flushed into Sandy's throat, and his eyelids snapped open as the searing pain shot into him like a gun blast. 

Nightmares. Pitch was forcing liquid fear straight into his body. It was so much more violent than the experience of being corrupted; it was the brutal act of being pumped full of an opposing element, a substance so inherently opposite to his own that the very presence of it in his veins seemed to make the walls of them swell outward in an attempt to avoid contact. His body wasn't absorbing the poison any more than flesh could absorb a knife. It was simply being pumped full, swelling painfully with every ounce of nightmarish poison Pitch was injecting into him. He felt a fresh wave of fear rush from Pitch's fangs, and as his body spasmed, he cried out.

The single sound---golden, agonized, a sound not heard since the death of the Golden Age---was a rabbit before starved hounds. Around them the tense nightmares rose in a shrieking height of arousal, ancient memories (burning star sails, crumpling ship cabins, the beautiful, beautiful screams of golden treasures trapped in dying stars) whetting them as sharply as present hunger. They could not truly be blamed for responding the way they did.

Nonetheless, Sandy hissed one furious curse at them as they rose in a wave and hovered, yowling, before they crashed down over himself and Pitch in one mind-rending splash.


	4. I Owed Little, Gave Less

Pitch came back to himself in slow waves.

First and most forceful came the idea of possession. He knew not what he possessed, nor what he was protecting it from; he only knew he had something that needed to be protected. He knew it was his. He knew something else wanted it.

He knew he wasn't going to give it up.

Automatically he curled, and the motion awoke his senses; he began to feel the tactile response of his fingers (he flexed them, felt the clawed ends drag on stone) and his knees (they hurt, pressed hard against the cold floor) and his face (it felt too thin, a little crumbly.) Something lukewarm was pressed against his stomach; it squished when he leaned on it, made a quiet sound his fuzzy hearing couldn't fully distinguish. There were other sounds, more audible ones, raucous squeals of anger.

He blinked repeatedly, trying to make sense of the shapes swirling in front of him. They were confusing and shadowy, and he looked down, waiting for his head to clear; then he saw the pale bundle curled beneath him, and things came back much faster.

The Sandman! His meal! Those wretched, treacherous little _monsters_ \---

He snarled viciously, long arms grabbing at the faintly-glowing star---Sandy moaned at the contact, a wonder Pitch would marvel over as soon as he could spare the focus for it---and then began snapping, fangs clattering together, narrowed eyes sweeping the room. He remembered feeding on the fear breeding in the Sandman's shell, terror forced into him like air into a vein, its tendrils swelling in him until he was a perfect cloud of fear that Pitch could drink off him in roiling waves. He remembered the nightmare men crashing over them both, fingers ripping at his face, shrieking mouths gnawing at his skin, but there seemed to be a ring of space now between the walls of wailing shadows and the two of them. Why had they withdrawn?

A mare.

He stared. The nightmare was stamping her hooves so fiercely sparks spat from the stone beneath; her nostrils and eyes were blown wide, bursting with oranges and reds as if a furnace was roaring inside her. Her head was tossing in nervousness, but every time one of the shadows made a rippling approach she screamed, rearing up in defiance, hooves beating the air until the slithering thing retreated.

The shadows were coursing about in a bubbling fury, confused by her betrayal; she herself seemed almost unsure, ears flat in near-panic. Pitch watched in quieter shades of disbelief. Why had this one turned? What had made her drive them off just as they had swarmed to feed? Surely she, too, was hungry.

The faint glimmer of gold still traced about her neck brought sudden clarity. Sandy, Sandy had ridden a nightmare into his home---

The thought of the Sandman weighed sharply, and he examined the thing beneath him again. Sandy seemed smaller than he should be, face burrowed into one pudgy arm, body curled in on itself like a whorled shell. As Pitch watched, his form rose and fell in one shuddery breath. It was accompanied by a faint keening sound, one he mistook, briefly, for that of a nightmare whispering closer; his gaze whipped about. The circle of space remained unbroken, guarded by the now frantically prancing mare.

The sound came again. Sandy was whimpering. 

At the noise the mare jerked her head back, and the chattering strike of her hooves on the stone quickened. A sneer triggered on Pitch's face; it made his mouth burn with pain. "Oh, well done, Sandman."

\---

Pitch's voice dripped over him like icy water, and he convulsed. Everything in his body was demanding his attention, and the clamor was deafening, senses cancelling each other out until all he could process was one great tide of pain that continually washed over him, rising and receding with each shallow breath. He thought there was something he needed to do, but the distance between vacant thought and logical progress was one he could not breach.

Everything shifted, and he tried to curl closer into himself, arms wrapped around his face, knees tucked upwards. The position hurt, but it seemed to him that not being in it would hurt worse. A heated wash of something swept over the back of his head. He risked peeking up. Pitch was sniffing at him like a dog.

Whatever was left of Pitch. The Nightmare King had expanded and his pupils had contracted, limbs lengthening and torso shortening, body cramming itself into a cacophony of painful contradictions. He looked like a monstrous fox with a crushed face, or perhaps a lion with too-sharp paws; even as Sandy squinted at him his form shifted, wavering between solid and ethereal, animalistic and spirit-like. Pitch's body was grasping at straws. Whatever it had found to feed itself with had been minimal. Sandy watched as one of the fox-like ears kinked, then broke away, cracking into shards of shadow and dust like a too-dry flower petal.

Whatever it had found to feed itself. Pitch had fed off him. Beneath all the crackling agony, the pain flourishing dark and livid in him, he felt the first tiny stirs of something that could grow up to be a very great anger.

Pitch had fed off of him. Not with the already present fear Sandy had offered him---and that had taken enough trust, trust he'd had to work up to a feverish high---but with fear Pitch had _planted_ in him. Furrowed in him like a farm. With fear Pitch had forced, violent and relentless, into his system like blood poisoning branching up a network of veins, inflammation creeping steadily for the heart. Like a knife plunged into his gut, over and over and over, while Pitch had bowed over him and refused to let him fight back, had forced the black stuff inside him until it found ground to sit, and to swell, and to fester. Until it bloated his tiny body like a drowned man's. Until he blistered and bubbled inside with plague, sickness gnawing away at his organs, his muscles, his eyes. Until he was round with a brooded ball of terror, the malicious burrowing things corkscrewing deeper into his guts.

The anger dawned on him mellowly, like a fogged morning, and it remained hidden as he pondered it. The pain was still present, hammering away at the last weary edges of his willpower, but the fear itself had evidently been bitten away from him during the nightmares' attack. He felt no foreign misery inside, sensed no malignant fears lurking deep in crevices. Just a great, acid-stinging emptiness, as if Pitch had taken a trowel to him and then, halfway through, been called away before he could seed the torn-up rows. The fear had burned into him, but it had not taken root. He'd been stripped clean by Pitch's own ravenous hunger, or the scraping jaws of the shadow horde.

Unsure of what had stopped the shadows' attack, but unwilling to divert what little energy he had towards finding out, Sandy met Pitch's eyes and attempted, with one weary quirk of a brow, to question what would happen next. For himself, he had no cards left up his sleeves: sleeves that were already starting to unravel into thin strands of dream-sand at the wrists, ends turning a lifeless grey that threatened to leech up into the rest of him. He needed sustenance. Pitch, despite his brief---Sandy felt a momentary flare of anger, like lightning in the clouds, before it hid again---feeding session, also needed sustenance. The undulating state of his body said that. Sandy stared up into his half-physical face. What now?

The wavering shadow-puppet that was Pitch smiled. The grin seemed to crack open on his face like a gourd bursting from sun-baked rottenness, like a broken eggshell spilling its half-formed contents onto a sidewalk. The perpetually shifting form was simultaneously fetal and ancient, a deeply-rooted archetype and a barely-formed afterbirth. Its monstrous paws wrapped about Sandy, heavy as chains one moment, light as a silk shawl the next.

A cackle trickled out of the splintered mouth. "Is this how it goes, then, Sandman? You save me, bring me back from the brink of destruction with some...heroic gesture? For what? To prove your control?"

Sandy gave a half-shrug, or whatever the slight motion of his left shoulder could be called. What deep and desperate place the gesture had come from meant nothing now; survival was their only goal, as far as he was concerned. Justification was for later. If he felt like it.

"To prove your breeding?" continued Pitch, to Sandy's vexation. "A call back to the lessons of mercy your kind always paraded about? Or---or was this more personal?" He was crouching closer, now, malevolent and still-shifting face shoved into Sandy's personal space; the star's brow furrowed, and he unclenched his stiff arms with difficulty to push at Pitch's chest. 

His hands went right through the dark shape, and as he stared at them, startled by how he could partially feel the bumps of a rib cage he'd just planted his hands in, a chill bit through his fingers as viciously as the cold floor had. He winced and tried to pull his hands away; for one brief, panic-lurching moment they did not budge, but then Pitch's mottled skin blurred and Sandy rocked back, pained knuckles pressed hard to his stomach. He thought Pitch might be laughing, but it was hard to tell. He could hear nothing. Only the jerky shudders of the larger spirit's shoulders suggested something that might be amusement.

Then Pitch's sharp face was almost pressed to his, and frigid breath lashed over his startled mouth. "Wanted to relish it yourself?" Pitch snarled, and Sandy saw then that it was not laughter in his eyes, but fury: fury white and banking itself to a cold so pristine it could burn on contact. Even his breath stung, huffing against Sandy's parted lips. And beneath that fury, sliding evasively under it like oil trapped beneath glass, but reflecting little glints of color, flickering tiny flashes that seemed to minnow upwards briefly before diving down once more, hiding in the depths---something else---something not as iron-willed as fury, something more malleable---something nuanced--- _betrayal?_ "Wanted to see me fallen, to extend a benevolent hand to your old friend? Wanted to _gratify_ me, oh magnanimous little Guardian?"

The echoed howl of his words was not lengthened by his own voice bouncing off the walls, Sandy realized with a jolt of fear. The echoing syllables punctuating each wrathful phrase came not from the walls, but what was swarming on them. He tried to look, but Pitch was crouched over him like a hawk on a mouse, arms mantling him, semi-solid body a wide blockade against the rest of the world; he could not see the nightmares clustering about them, could only guess at how many there were. A great many, he thought, from the trailing echoes of chattering, furious noise that followed the rise and fall of Pitch's words. Somewhere along the way the Nightmare King had found the energy to raise his voice. "You thought you'd find me sleeping! You thought you'd approach me while I was stripped to the bone, while I was a carcass for the refuse to pick clean, and you'd get your last good look at me---"

 _Frenzied,_ Sandy realized, another guttering candle of fear lighting up in his belly. _Almost hysterical. He knows he's still at the edge of it, it could still take him._ The candle's flame licked higher. _I'm the only food here. Why aren't they attacking? Quiet, quiet! Quiet!_ Desperate, he raised a hand in a gesture that he knew, even as he made it, would not comfort in the way he intended it to.

Pitch's golden irises were blown out, pupils pinpricks of inky noise; they riveted on Sandy's hand, and he reared back his head, tossed it about on a sinuous neck too long for his square chest. His body seemed to have paused for now somewhere between snake and priest. "Merciful gentleman!" he snarled, and his rage was palpable, quivering, imperious. "Come to give a black hole one last blink of light as it crumbled inwards---"

Sandy's self-control must have leaked out of his ears somewhere around the time he was being pumped full of terror, he guessed, because he threw both hands forward in a desperate smack; his palms hit solid flesh, this time, and deep in Pitch's chest he could actually feel the rumble of rage building. Pitch's jaw opened, too wide, too wide, and Sandy looked up into far too many rows of needle-thin teeth.

"My hero," hissed Pitch, voice slithering out through all those dozens of minuscule knives.

And then his jaw unhinged, and Sandy stared into an empty, starving maw.

That was when, thoroughly done with this shit, and he meant _every single piece of this entire pile of shit_ , he hauled back and punched Pitch in the throat.

\---

The Sandman _punched_ him.

In the _throat_.

"Thricedamnedlittlebastard," hacked Pitch, or something near to it, out of a near apoplectic spate of gurgling. "Hatefullittlething." He tried to recover, but wheezed with the effort; his overtaxed lungs, already strained too far with his verbal fury, just gave him a sort of angry whistle that scraped hollowly out his throat. One lean hand clutched uselessly at his neck. The other tried, and failed, to scrape the righteous satisfaction off Sandy's face. Sandy just bit him.

"Little star-wheeling weasel," rasped Pitch. Beneath him the Sandman cocked a defiantly unimpressed glare in response. Pitch snarled, allowing himself the inane but soothing act of sucking on his nipped thumb. His glittering eyes were hard on Sandy's face, but he simply kept the pad of his thumb to his lips, glowering; he was discovering, to his great distemper, that he'd lost the momentum of his anger. "Treacherous wretch," mumbled Pitch, through a mouthful of thumb. It came out mostly rumbled consonants.

The Sandman gave a diffident shrug, clearly unimpressed with his posturing, and made a sharp gesture to the side.

Pitch huffed, and Sandy's eyes narrowed in impatience; he jabbed a finger out again, indicating with weakened severity---any quick motion seemed to drain him---to the left. Pitch allowed himself the petty satisfaction of turning his head opposite the direction emphasized, but the action succeeded in its goal nonetheless.

"Carrion-thieves," said Pitch, but now he was focused on them, watching them with short, birdlike twitches of his head. Sandy was right. He needed to be aware of this.

The walls were crawling with nightmare men, shades, twisted little scraps of fearlings. The dark corners of the hall teemed with bubbles of hungry life. Only now did he realize the comfortable quiet was caused by a lack of the mare's frenzied pawing; when Pitch looked to her he found her head hung low, hooves moving only in a specter of the nervous emphasis from before. Her eyes had gone dim. Taking a more focused stock of the situation, he saw it was a miracle the shadows hadn't re-surged yet. He had to recover his strength. He was still in danger.

It was unexpected, then, when the sensation that welled up most strongly in him was a surge of possessiveness.

His body warred with the memory of something dragon-like, and came out with the battered metallic scales of a monitor instead. His nails clacked against the stone as he sprawled his limbs out, claws and feet corralling Sandy like bedposts; his head tipped low, and he bared his fangs. The low snarl building in his chest was not aimed at the star, however.

The hive of shadow had slowed its murmuring ripple to observe his change in stance. At the sound of his claim the action returned: shades flickered across the obsidian, boiling up in small pits of cognitive dark on the floor. The mare, sensing the revived spirit of the shadows, lifted her head, but her mane was stringing across her eyes in a bedraggled mess and she did not rise off her front hooves. She merely gave a weary huff of warning.

Pitch could not offer much better. The meal the Sandman had provided was supplemental at best. He'd had to force in almost as much fear as the star had exuded in response. Still, it had been enough to reclaim some amount of a solid form, and certainly enough to grasp mental clarity again. And his mental clarity was singing for him to gather up his crinkled edges, fall into the nearest shadow, and escape. He could recover elsewhere. There was no shame in choosing your battles.

Beneath him, Sandy was withdrawing into a curled shell again, body greying, face more distant than it had been moments ago. Pitch recognized the softening of the eyelids, the untensing of the brow. It did not mean the pain had lessened. It meant it had increased, and was reaching an unmanageable height.

Pitch studied the sphere barely a third of his size, smaller, even, now that breeding the fear had taken so much out of the Sandman's body. He'd pumped the star-pilot's form with a fertile and vicious river of fear, but the terror had found no delta to swamp and soften. It had simply run right out of him again, leaving him drained---empty, mostly, like a clam shell with no clam inside, still the right shape but all the important bits torn out---but no more undone than he'd been before. If he'd just let the fear run its course, finding dark places to grow within him, Pitch's uncontrolled hunger would have ripped him apart. He'd have popped like the stitches on an old shirt coming undone, everything unraveling at once. It would have been a bit like someone dropping a ball of yarn. Pitch could imagine it in his head, old colorless images coming to him from a place he was not sure he even recognized, and he could see the fatal crack that would have happened in the Sandman's glassy eyes.

Now Sandy's eyes were hooded, but they looked up at him with the hard clarity of unmarred stone, polished and serene. The Sandman wasn't the robbed clam shell, he thought, distantly. He was the pearl.

The mare screamed, and the hazed, exhaustion-fueled trance Pitch had gradually fallen towards dissipated in an instant. His gaze jerked up just in time to see one of the larger shadows leap upon the mare's back, six-inch fangs sinking into her neck. She reared, pawing fearfully at the air, but the thing clung to her and began to snap its head violently back and forth. The mare stumbled, recovered, and then, with one last, furious tattoo of hooves on stone, fell sideways.

As she fell, Pitch heard the threatening creak of her neck. Then an outstretched wing of the shadows descended upon her, and it was over very quickly after that.

The Sandman had begun to struggle at the first of her cries, his muted sounds almost lost beneath her own; Pitch received them more through vibration than hearing, the faint, bell-like ring of interstellar speech rebounding off his chest, striking deep where the lizard-scales forgot what they were doing and crept quietly back into skin. There was little danger of the star-pilot moving, even an outstretched arm trying the boundaries of his energy, but Pitch shuffled his awkwardly-formed body about to hem him in, nonetheless. When Sandy spit low curses at him and tried to rise, he crouched down until there was room for nothing but a breath and a hiss between his chest and the Sandman's own.

"Still," he said, and because the finality of the heavy thud was undeniable, Sandy obeyed.

The fallen form provided little for the shadows; they could glean nothing desirable from the corrupted sand that comprised the nightmare's body. With a disappointed howl they rose up, and this time there was not such a wide retreat; the shadows stayed close, wavering and beginning to push off the flat surfaces of the rock, and Pitch felt the overwhelming cloud of their ill intent swelling like the buzz of mosquitoes in a summer heat. It hummed nervously in his ears, and he could imagine the deafening thrum of panic it was attempting to strike across Sandy's nerves. He felt the star begin to shudder, but there was no more noise.

He filled the silence with a short, but very direct, growl.

At the sound all the activity in the room increased; now there was real sound, the whisper of shadow-fingers being dragged over stone, the hiss of shadow-feet slipping intimately closer in the dark. Pitch turned a tight circle, clawed feet---at some point they'd grown talons---carefully penning Sandy in despite the movement. He raised his head, feeling the fangs peel further out from his gum line, and snarled viciously. The shadows answered with a gibbering noise of whistles and squeaks, groans and howls.

"Back," he hissed, and when they responded with a rise in tone, he followed suit, raising his own voice in a belting roar. The sound faltered some of them near the edges, but the solid body stayed resolute; he turned another half-circle, yellow eyes darting to keep track, and this time his bellow was so loud the gravel on the floor trembled.

Now all of them slowed, examining him more cautiously. He bared his fangs at them in a vicious claim.

"Mine," he said, and meant it.

\---

He almost thought Pitch had done it. His vision was starting to waver again, and anyway he couldn't see much beyond the mutated, scaly legs of the beastly form the Nightmare King had been gradually slipping into; he could hear the scuffle of rebuffed shadows, however, and the way their movements changed from an intent stalk to an angry circling. For one dim, tired moment he even reached the thought, _They're cowed. They'll withdraw. He's done it._

Then the cavern bristled like a dozen hackles going up at once, and everything around him descended into a terrible chaos.

The screams were piercing and full of fear. What made them so terrible was that the fear was not a reactionary sound, like a response to a danger; it was a deeper strain, like the throaty chords that made a bass' hearty thrum instinctively bass: the fear was part of the sound-maker itself, an intimate piece of its being, and the tone of it was audible not as a response, but as a declaration of identity. It was the shrieking, terror-filled voice of a fearling crying out to companions, connecting with the horde, renewing its own strength as an instrument carved out of fear. It was the horrible cacophony of a fearling attack.

Sandy buried his face in his hands, hiding.

He couldn't help it. He was worn to the bone. He had nothing left to give, nothing left to recover, no last-resort stores to draw upon. He had been down in the stifling dark for far too long already. And the noise...

The cavern rebounded with the shards of sounds as they hit obsidian rock-faces and splintered, shattering in waves of mutilated echoes; it made the entire hall seem to be filled with nightmare men, as if they were countless, endless, borne up on all sides by following waves of their brethren, each further swell more cracked and twisted than the last. He hadn't heard something like it since the days of sailing---since he'd been on a merchant ship, hammering away at a half-cracked beam, praying desperately for a pitiful hack-job to hold long enough to reach port, and then the first faint sounds had begun to wash against the keel...

The memories were ancient, but the gut-deep instincts were not, and he tried to defend himself; finding no ounce of energy to draw upon, his body moved on, burrowing into the last vestiges of self-preservation. His arms remembered to shield his head, but his brain could not follow his body into that final move of appropriate action. It simply stalled, trapped in the demented mix of yowling and frenzied cackling that stirred all around him. He gave one last weak attempt at summoning his sanity. _Hold,_ what remained of his mind thought, _hold, you are a star-pilot, you are the only light left in the dark places, you must hold---_

About him the merciless grinder chewed on, the air soaking in chunks of terror and cruelty and ancient rage, and what was left in him froze and broke.

His arms dropped away, too heavy to hold up any longer, and with a sick heave he began to sob.

Overhead, something screamed in gleeful fury. He closed his eyes, and so never saw the blow fall.


	5. And Death From Above Is Still A Death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ombric is totally not half as much of a rambling fogey as I've made him seem in this chapter. He's actually the world's coolest dude. I'm sorry, Ombric. It was just better this way.

With every sweep of his claws he felt joy burn higher inside him, the vicious splatters of it vivid in his throat, the cruel howls of it falling out of him like laughter. He shredded their bodies like rice paper, fingers catching in their lamplight eyes, talons hooking into the bases of their wobbling skulls and popping them free like corks; shade and blackness slathered out of them in shrieking gushes. He howled for them to try him and they tried, and with each rising wave of them he fed.

Their defiant screams were like a bellows on the tiny, flickering light beneath him, sound forcing fear from it with a cold crush. He felt every burst of the fear feed into him in a delicious wash, pungent flumes of it opening up in his chest like blood in water, its strength diffusing into every inch of him until he could close his jaws over the fearlings' arms and rip them free, joints pulling free with suctioned clicks, skin stretching and tearing in long peeling strips. 

The source of terror beneath him was miniscule, barely a seed of light in the swarming depths, but it continued to pulse even as it was hammered mercilessly by the countless waves of sound, every rising threat clutching it tight enough to wring mindless fear from its heart. It was an ancient fear. It was no cool fright, no assumed danger, no thoughtless response to something scary and unknown. It was the pure vintage of known horror. It was the heady drought of something too terrible to name returned once more; the acrid, bitterly clear fear of a trauma not new but deeply, terribly familiar.

It was a pristine wine, jewel-rich, bitingly sweet as wild berries, viciously sharp as splintered stone. Pitch drank every drop, and felt it blossom within him in surges too delicious to explain.

The fearlings were starting to separate, now, no longer one massive cluster of dark but an array of gremlins and shadow-forms, singled out in clumps, skittering away from his heavy swings. Some of them saw the glittering scythe form over his shoulder, and wisely melted into the crevices of the floor or the corners of the room. Too many of them didn't, and he had the deep satisfaction of hearing a rise of fearful cries as the blow descended.

It sliced cleanly through the largest mass of them, and all at once a dozen bodies dropped away, fading even as their upper halves toppled free like flowers cut at the neck. The sudden loss of the larger portion of them sent the rest into the final waste of confusion, and he chased the remaining swarms off with leisurely sweeps of his scythe, then with slow snaps of his jaws. He retreated as well, form drawing in on itself, extra limbs and legs and whetted lines folding back into the strengthened mass of himself until he was relatively human again. Until he was small enough to stand by his treasure, not over it. His claws shriveled down, but his mouth was still full of pointed teeth when he snapped lazily at a fleeing shadow; it shrieked and sucked away down a crack in the floor. He made one or two more turns, feeling greatly satisfied, before he turned to look over what had both empowered him and driven him to a clamorous frenzy.

What he saw thrust a steel rod through the swelling heat of his victory, and his righteous joy dissipated in a breath, replaced only with confusion.

He dropped to one knee. The Sandman seemed to have collapsed in on himself, shrinking away as quietly as Pitch's claws had; the swaths of his robes looped across the floor in a tangled sprawl, and in the center of the mess lay a body far too lean and drawn to tidy them up again. Pitch extended his hands; then, pricked with unexpected uncertainty, he hesitated. His fingertips were still craggy, ends ruptured where claws had burst out. He concentrated until they smoothed over.

The Sandman seemed slender and bent as a birch, his now-grey hair knotted and curled against his forehead; the hand Pitch could see was thin, pale skin clinging to pain-crooked knuckles. The comforting, baby roundness of his face had sapped away, leaving behind a softly-sloped jaw and high cheeks; yet Pitch could not evade the feeling he looked much younger, a child left behind after some hard knife had scraped away the strong, confident shield around him. Finally Pitch's fingers made contact with Sandy's elbow, and he spoke. "Sandman."

The eyelashes fluttered, and to his shock, the pursed lips moved. What slipped free from them was soft, but he leaned in to catch at it, sucking in every word. "It hurts, Koz."

He didn't know what 'Koz' meant, nor what had happened to slice away the soft curves and golden curls until there was only this grey-and-white facsimile left, a burned matchstick that had flared out. "I'm sorry?" he offered, automatically, and did not know why he had said it.

The glazed eyes wandered over his face, and he knew instinctively that Sandy was not entirely with him; that some part of the star was rambling in a fever-place very far away. Still, he pressed his fingers more insistently to the thin wrist anyway, allowed his voice to become more demanding. "Sandman," he said again. "Look at me."

Hazy, Sandy's eyes did so. "What a funny old universe," whispered the pilot, and his voice was like flat champagne sloshing around in a glass, fizz half-gone. Pitch could imagine, clear as day, how it would sound full of life: all the tiny perfect bubbles of it rising in a brook-giggle, the golden splash of it against ringing crystal. He must have had a beautiful voice in his day, Pitch thought, and then put the thought firmly away.

"What a mess this has been," he said instead.

"What a mess," agreed the shade that had been a star, eyelids shuttering. His chest was not moving. For half a breath Pitch felt an empty coldness rise in him; but then the chest rose in another faint lift, and he knew Sandy was still present. "What a mess," he repeated, softer, and then his hand groped weakly at his chest.

Pitch pressed a hand there. "Still."

Sandy's fingers continued clutching, faltering as they found Pitch's hand; then they rested over his own longer ones, ashen twigs laced over darker grey. Pitch's fingers twitched once and then stayed very still.

"Why," he said, suddenly, and in the empty cavern the question seemed too small and effortless to deserve being asked. But the echoes of it swelled in his lungs until he was repeating it, until it barreled from his mouth in broad wheezes. "Why? Why did you come? What was it all for? Why did you come to---to mock me, and yet cripple yourself before you came? Why didn't you leave? _Why did you come?_ "

Again, there was a second where he thought he had asked too late, and the answers were sealed in a place he could never reach. But there was the rise again, and another, and after a lengthy moment another. And then Sandy's half-vanished voice rambled over the musical curves of its vowels. "The only question that matters, in the end," he said, and was silent. His hand groped at Pitch's fingers once more.

"Well?" hissed Pitch, because it mattered. It mattered too much to play games with, damn it, it mattered as much as anything that had transpired. He withdrew his hand with a snarl of frustration, fingers clutching into a fist. "Answer me!"

Sandy's eyes had closed again. Now his other hand withdrew from his sunken clothes, and he searched blindly for the other spirit, fingers dragging lightly at the floor until Pitch, frustrated with the inefficiency of it all, angrily gave him a hand. Sandy promptly turned it over, and his pointer finger began to trace a circling shape into Pitch's palm.

"What is this?" He said it through half-closed teeth, tongue pressed angrily to them, his confusion wrecking havoc with his patience. But the Sandman repeated the motion, fingertip tracing again and again the intricate pattern over his skin, and he stared at it with a focus too intense to break. "I don't---" he began, and then hissed, because the repetition was starting to sting; what little of Sandy remained golden was leaving traces of the path along his palm, and with each new scrawl it etched a little brighter, lasted a little longer, until finally he could see the whole shape glowing dimly in his hand. He stared at it, eyes bouncing over the half-circle outlines, the looping scrawl within. The shapes stirred something in his memory.

"I don't know this," he said, more slowly, but he realized even as he said it that it was untrue; he knew this, some ancient part of him did, it was just buried too deep for quick retrieval. Pitch was nothing if not self-aware, and he would not let this remain a personal secret. Deeply, almost feverishly, he dug. "What is this damned cut? You've nearly made me bleed, you vicious thing. What does it mean? It's not even a language. What does it mean---"

And he stopped dead, because he'd remembered what it meant.

The Sandman's hand fell away. On his mouth a small, peaceful smile flitted quietly down to rest.

Pitch remained staring at his open palm, watching the glowing lines. He watched them even after they began to fade, and all that remained was a faint dark line to mark where the golden design had been scraped into his skin.

There was a long, motionless quiet between them.

Finally, Pitch said, "I suppose you're right."

\---

"But you could have just asked that in the first place," said Ombric, a little sourly.

North tried his best not to glower. As it happened, he'd wanted to ask that in the first place; in point of fact he _had_ asked it in the first place, but then Bunnymund had made the mistake of asking where exactly Ombric had gotten his information and why he'd had it when it had bypassed any one of them, 'them' being, you know, Guardians and all, and Ombric's left brow had gone a bit twitchy and he'd asked if his credentials as a Golden Age scholar were really being questioned by a _Pooka_ , and it had all gone downhill from there.

North was usually patient with these sorts of things, but he needed an answer now. Well, all right, he didn't need it; it wasn't like anybody was dying or anything. It was just that he wanted it. He'd not gotten a straight answer from the Man in the Moon about why Sandy, a few weeks back, had seen fit to scamper off to Pitch's realm and, as Jack had put it, 'Give the old man a dose of crack and set him loose on we poor, unsuspecting Guardians.'

The last part was a bit exaggerated, he thought---from what he'd heard, the most recent appearance of the Boogeyman two nights ago had ended with Tooth flitting imperiously homeward and Pitch making a very undignified retreat with more than a few pin-feathers jabbed into unfortunate places---but it was undeniable that Pitch had been seen around, and he had been looking rather healthy. Quite solid, in fact. A regular stand-up nightmare. And while North wasn't too concerned about keeping him in line (he'd had his own run-in a week earlier, and he'd put Pitch up a chimney with a well-placed boot and left him there) he was concerned over why Sandy had thought it a good idea to help _make_ him that way.

Sandy himself had been...well, coquettish was the word that came to mind first: Sand had been coquettish about the whole thing, shrugging and smirking and throwing off little mysterious winks and nods until North was ready to shake him, and certainly would have if he didn't know it would give him nothing but a bout of sand-beard. The others had gotten similarly useless results. Sandy had been as tight-lipped as---well, as himself, even though they'd all exclaimed over how he seemed to be a little too pale, and his eyes were just a little tired, and was it just them or had he lost a few pounds? Privately, they'd agreed that the whole thing was mysterious as hell, though Tooth had fluffed her feathers and made a rather arch comment to her fairies about "yes, I know we agreed on a pool, but I distinctly remember betting five to one _for_ this, so you can tell her to kiss my crown," and that made North suspect she knew a touch more than she was saying.

Then they'd gone to Manny, who had given them nothing but a brightly-lit night and one circular image, reflected sharply on the floor. Briefly they'd been enthusiastic; then the symbol turned out to be nothing but an unrecognizable scribble, and they were left as confused as before. Almost hopeless, North had turned to his old tutor and good friend Ombric, calling the wizard up on an enchanted mirror he'd happened to have laying around ("Happened my tufted arse," Bunny had grumbled, "he just likes showin' off his stuff," but Jack had been greatly impressed by it anyway.)

Ombric had given them a good deal of hope when he'd adjusted his glasses, looked the symbol over, hrumphed twice and immediately identified it as 'star script, quite obviously.' There'd been a cautious return of optimism. Then Bunny had unwisely questioned his credentials, and it had all gone downhill from there. Right now Bunnymund and Ombric seemed to be splitting their attention between egg-decorating and book-browsing, respectively, and a nonstop volley of snippety comments.

Again, normally, North was patient with these sorts of things. You had to be patient with some gumming about when you dealt with Bunnymund. But he was a busy man, and they all had things to be doing, and most importantly he really, really wanted to know what had possessed Sandy to go and raise Pitch up to a nice, healthy shade of spooky again. Like, really wanted to know. The curiosity was practically burning him.

Ombric cleared his throat, and to North's relief he seemed to be recovering his former train of thought. "As I said, a sentence. It would be placed as a decorative notation on a marriage proposal, or any number of other things." He said this loudly, in Bunny's direction. The rabbit focused pointedly on his work. "A pendant, a bellows---"

North held up a hand. "A bellows."

"Yes," said Ombric, looking only marginally annoyed by the interruption. "A bellows. For a fire, you know, you use it to stoke the flame."

"I know what a bellows is," said North, more sharply than he'd intended. "I have one. I use it regularly. Why would it be on a bellows?"

" _Because_ , and I might note we could have gotten to this quite a bit earlier..."

"Yes," said North, with what he hoped was an apologetic nod. "Yes, we're sorry---aren't we sorry, Bunny?" Bunnymund gave a grunt that could, with a great deal of kindness, perhaps be called apologetic. "We're terribly sorry, all of us. We're sorry, aren't we, Manet?" The yeti sweeping up in the corner gave a snort of surprise at being addressed, but good-naturedly offered its apology as well.

Ombric's bushy eyebrows gathered together, and he glowered at his former student. "Are you mocking me, Nicholas?"

"Never," said North. Behind him, Toothiana tittered quietly. He shoved both hands into his pockets, crossed both sets of fingers, and grinned charmingly. "Never, ever," he swore with a great deal more certainty. "Not even at my worst."

"Hmh," said Ombric, eyeing him dubiously, but then he looked down at his manuscript again. The Bookworm had an itch, and the pages were rustling animatedly. "Yes, well, as I was getting to...yes. If you _please_." The Bookworm quieted guiltily. "Yes! Hrhm. The circles, they represent sentences, and this one---" He threw a sharp look of warning at Bunny, then at North, and then, for good measure, at Manet sweeping innocently in the corner. "---This one was popular for a number of uses, likely had a brief romanticized fad. Initially, it probably came from a religious text---one of the original Scorpio documents, I must admit I suspect, though of course I have no proof of that yet. A fascinating study, the Scorpio libraries! Do you know, they'd kept documents dating all the way back to the formation of the constellation itself---ah, yes. Here, you see." He pointed to the page; the Bookworm, pleased to be moving again, fluttered upwards and obligingly turned towards the mirror to let the page be examined. North gave a small noise of pleasure when he recognized the complex, circular diagram.

"Yes! That's it, that's definitely it. It was simpler in the center, but that was it."

"Yes, well, it was likely a bit of shorthand." Ombric brought the Bookworm gently back down to the table, and examined the page. "I've read the pilots had their own form of star-script, a sort of chummy one-of-us mentality, I suppose. Yes, yes, I told you such. Old engraving. Marriage and such. Let's see---bellows, yes, bridles occasionally, yes, shrine-stones, particularly for the fire alters---"

North heard Jack, leaning civilly against the table, start to make a series of barely audible, but very quick, popping noises with his mouth. When it came to boredom, Jack was not someone you'd refer to as subtle.

"And what does it _mean_ ," said North, and silently decided he deserved some sort of award for patience. He'd make one for himself later in the afternoon. Perhaps it would have great bushy eyebrows on it. "What's it say?"

"Ah, yes. Yes, you see..." Ombric trailed off, mumbling over the page. At the table, Bunnymund threw his paintbrush down so hard it bounced.

"Damn your eyes, old man, what's it say?"

"My eyes are quite old enough as they are without _your_ ill airs, E. Aster Bunnymund," said Ombric sharply. "But the symbol, yes, I really do think it was religious, once. Mostly alters for fire sacrifices? Of course. But yes, a sentence. It translates---" He coughed, and his eyebrows jutted upwards as he read the inscription under the diagram. "It says, 'without you, I become ash. With you, I die every moment, but to live anew'." His finger moved, mouth shaping silently around words as he translated, and then he continued. "As I said, shorthand was common. The outer ring of text eventually tightened to exclude some of the inner flourishes, and it was generally translated as 'I exist only with you.' A lack of identity without the other half, essentially. Rather like how one can't comprehend cold without the opposing idea of warmth, or not-cold."

North's mouth opened, but then it shut again with a hard press of his lips. Ombric removed his glasses, nodding absently. "Yes, a sacrificial engraving, quite. Most likely Scorpio. It would be used to symbolize the act of rebirth, you see? To put fuel on a fire. And the fuel, that would be the engraver, would be consumed, only to exist in a new form as the flame. A very vicious sentiment, no wonder there was some moral concern. But I suppose we all have our flings with danger when we are young, yes? We are all foolish when we are young." His voice trailed away, and his hand moved, absently, to stroke his beard. "Yes, we are all sometimes foolish..."

North did not hear, nor care to hear, the distant memories of youth that had dragged heavily through that last sentence. He was too busy turning, in his hand, the piece of paper on which he had scrawled the Moon's rendition of the circular symbol.

"Pilot shorthand," he said, bringing Ombric's musings to a halt. The older wizard stopped, peering out at him from under his bushy eyebrows.

"Well, yes," he said. "Quite likely. I've heard they were terrible ones for marking up the fleet's property, you see. Etching scores into their ship hulls and all that nonsense. Even little personal messages on beams and tables, you know, 'Beau loves Strident', or a crew name, or whatnot. Graffiti, really. They had a whole culture of marking up whatever they worked with. They weren't ones for subtlety, not the star pilots."

"Not really," said North, distractedly, still looking at the paper.

"Not really," echoed Bunny from where he sat at the table. He had put down his paintbrush again, and his piercing eyes met North's. "Not subtlety, quite, but rather little devils for secrecy, eh?'

North nodded, slowly, and then looked back to his mentor. Ombric was watching them, clearly trying to parse what they were getting at. "And why would you be needing this information, my young friend, might I now ask?"

"No need t'be askin' why," said Bunnymund, brusquely, and turned abruptly back to his work. "But if y'must know, I found it on an old sword of mine, and couldn't for th' life of me remember what it meant. So you can chew that, eh?"

"I suppose I can." Ombric's eyes narrowed in satisfaction. "And you questioned my base of knowledge?"

Bunnymund gave an embarrassed grunt of acknowledgement, and Ombric was gracious enough to let his victory go without further ado. "Well, young man," he said, turning back to North. "It's been wonderful, quite, but I really must be back to work. And I'm sure you have a good deal to be doing."

"Someday you will look at my white hairs and call me not so young," said North, but he was smiling. The smile did not quite reach his eyes. "But away with you, master, back to your scrolls and your spells."

"Away with you," said Ombric, amiably. "Back to your toys and your tots." Then the mirror flashed, and all it showed was the reflection of their four carefully blank faces, and in the corner of the room Manet still sweeping away.

Toothiana broke the silence. "For star-pilots," she said, carefully.

North was turning the paper again, but this time he wasn't looking at the marking on it. He was looking out the window, towards the blue sky; the moon was not out yet, but he looked upwards anyway, thinking of the way the sky would turn deeper blue the further you went from Earth, darker and darker until you were out amongst the black, in a presence of darkness so complete it was pierced only by the bright, tiny prick of stars.

Jack was seated on the table, watching Bunny paint. The rabbit's brush was drawing thin, lovely little lines of gold around the center of the egg, looping gentle waves over and over until there was a complex knot wrapped snug around it, golden threads woven tight in an intricate band. The two of them looked at the egg, and then, voicelessly, Jack pushed the tiny pot of black paint within reach. Bunnymund stared at it, but then, deceptively calmly, he dipped the very tip of the brush in the black paint.

Jack watched him add, with great care, a single interwoven band of black to the golden braid. Not a wide band, just one black thread. It seemed out of place on the intricate yellow knotwork, but then Bunny took more gold and wove it over the black, until Jack couldn't see where the gold had ended and the black had begun, until it seemed they were both sourced from and ending in the same place, and the loop of them went on in one tiny Mobius strip, forever.

The sound of crumpling paper made them all look up; North squinted, taking aim, and bounced the balled-up symbol off a hanging hot-air balloon and into the wastebasket.

"How are the designs coming, Bunny?" he asked, and the rabbit shrugged non-commitally. "I am still saying you should draw them on something that lasts. Blueprints were a wonderful invention."

"Don't you worry your magnanimous spirit over me, Nicky. I got my methods." He did not mention the careful gathering he had done by hand of these first eggs, the canvases for the next year's designs. "It'll be Frost's first Easter, y'think I'm gonna pull a bad turnout? C'mon."

Jack hopped onto the table, staff tapping excitedly at the floor, a staccato of glee. "Man, I am going to find every egg you hide around my place." He grinned at the challenging sneer Bunnymund had just fixed him with. "Check it: I am going to find every egg. Like, twice." 

The rabbit only smirked. "We'll see about that, kiddo."

"How very good," said North, lightly, so lightly that at first they did not look at him. "Such distress last time we combined snow and spring. Who'd have thought we'd figure out a happy balance between the two?"

The heft of his words settled on them like cloth on water, threads slowly gathering weight, the whole thing taking its time settling down into the depths. As it did, they looked at each other. There was more than a little consideration.

Jack looked back at the egg, at the gold and black band wrapped neatly about its center. "Listen, smart guy," he said, but the corner of his mouth was hitching into something that might, someday, learn how to be a smile. "Sometimes these things just work themselves out."

 

 

_Epilogue_

He'd given the mare back.

At first, he'd been grateful for her. When Pitch had brought him to her body, the teeth marks of fearlings still smoking in her hide, all he'd been able to think was _I did this to you_ , and _I'm so sorry_ , and _It will all be all right, now. I will make it all right_. And it had been. He'd gathered up handfuls of her, tiny shaking palmfuls of gritty corrupted sand, and he'd whispered and breathed and hummed life into her until those fistfuls became a shimmering pile, and then a glowing flame. He'd coaxed her back to what she'd been once---a dream of swimming, he thought, a dream of swimming in a summer lake, a duck on clear water, a duck and ducklings---and then, when she was full of self once more, when every inch of her sang again with the knowledge that _this is what I am, I am this,_ he'd put his hands on her and let her take one final breath, and then he'd let her burst.

It was a silent explosion, and a gentle one, if such a thing could be; she simply seemed to puff into floating swirls of sand, like a dry dandelion blown apart. The granules of her had drifted back down to him, settling on him like fireflies, and as they illuminated him like candles in a darkened window, Pitch stayed by his side. The light seemed to hurt the Nightmare King's eyes, but he stayed, staring down at Sandy's prostrate form with unblinking, terribly dark eyes. Sandy closed his own, and let the broken dream sink back into his skin.

Because that was what most dreams did, in the end. Either a dream stayed with the person who had shaped it, illuminating a path for them, showing them step by small step how to get someplace closer to the desire that had birthed it in the first place, or it returned to his own hands, the hands that had brought it to life when it was merely a seed of a desire deep in the dreamer's mind. Many dreams returned to Sandy this way, unwanted, or unheeded, or simply not yet necessary; some, too, returned to him like this, bruised and lame, trampled and trailing hurt. And he took them back. He took them all back, every lost and abandoned and twisted one, and he pulled the pained dream back into himself, and he let it sift through the layers of him like shells shifting in layers of sand. And over time, when he felt it was ready, he let the dream go again. When it had turned enough within him, when it had been polished until it was a pearl, brilliant and ready to be loved. When he had absorbed the hurt and the loss, the hunger and the sorrow, he gave it a buff, kissed its forehead, and sent it off into the world once more, bright and shiny and new. It was what he did. He wasn't simply a creator of dreams; he was their caretaker.

And for a short time, he had cared for the mare. Buried deep within him once more, her golden flares had revived him enough to stand, then to drift, and finally to leave Pitch's realm; how he had left, and after what communication, was a secret he tucked neatly away in a quiet box in his head. He locked the box, hung the key in its place, and left the room it was stored in.

He did not, however, forget where it was stored.

He'd let the duck-pond-turned-mare-turned-duck-pond-again dream sleep inside him, his own shifting layers turning it gently as a mother bird might turn her eggs, keeping them equally warm; as she settled deeper into him, breaking into tiny grains of consciousness, he began to buff gently away at the pain that had caused her to grow so twisted. But each stinging hurt he peeled away from her was one he found himself fumbling with, turning it over in his hands instead of simply swallowing it down and letting it dissipate inside him.

There were so many layers of pain that had made her. Every one of them was lonely, or suspicious, or needy. And he hauled off layer after layer of it, pulled away strip after strip until he felt almost suffocated by the weight of it wrapping around him, and still there was more. The hurt had infused her almost to the very core, an entire body of old, black pain around an even older, even wearier golden heart.

Finally Sandy had stopped pulling it all away. He'd looked at what he had left---a small dream, now, a tiny little thing with a golden core and a few dark layers of greedy desire and lonely vigil---and he'd thought, and then he'd gathered her up, and he'd drifted quietly into the night sky.

It had not been hard to find what he was looking for. There were shadows everywhere, and all one had to do was walk until one felt a chill, a slight nervousness, and that was an appropriate shadow. He stopped at the first one he found, a long, lean thing cast by an oak, one in a hundred shadows the moon cast in the night forest. He settled down, knitted his hands together, and called her out.

She was dainty, now, little dancing hooves showing slivers of gold beneath the black, little pointed head tossing lightly in the crisp air. She was little and new again. He gave her sleek sides one last polishing stroke, tipped down to kiss her forehead, and then released her into the night.

In the quiet forest she stood still, sniffing the air. She was not entirely sure what to do. He waited patiently. She scraped with her hooves, scented the air again, and this time her miniature ears pricked; she circled, beginning to trot, and he watched her find the familiar scent.

The dream circled once more, not entirely certain; then, with a whinny, she knew, and she dove into the shadow at a gallop. She vanished as neatly as if the ground itself had opened and swallowed her up.

Sandy waited.

Nothing came back out of the shadow. No returning message, no angry sound, no bitter response. The moon shifted slowly overhead, and still Sandy waited. It was not until dawn was breaking that he heard the clatter of hooves once more.

The sound echoed as it came, and grew rapidly larger; then the nightmare burst from the ground in a flying streak, streams of fear flickering off her like pennants, mighty hooves clamoring against the thin dawn air. She was monstrous, now, twice as tall as he was, neck strong as a young willow, curved back broad and effortlessly sturdy. She examined him with burning eyes that did not so much recognize him as warn him, wordlessly, not to move too close. The golden streaks at her hocks had all disappeared.

Still, he moved. Her hooves pricked repeatedly, but she allowed him to approach; he did not come close enough to touch, however, merely close enough to make out the black lines scratched neatly at the base of her neck like an owner's brand, almost hidden by the trail of her mane. The shifting streaks of her made them hard to decipher, but he'd recognize the half-circles and looped lines anywhere.

_'I exist only with you.'_

Clasping his hands together, he closed his eyes and nodded.

She leaped away in a burst of darkness, streaking back down into the shadow from whence she'd come. Sandy stared into the pit, and then turned away, cloudlike sand drifting hazily to life under him and lifting him effortlessly into the sky.

He went up, up until he had cleared the trees, until the air was thin, until he could look down and see clouds drifting by below. Overhead, only the endless black of space, and the wide moon shining silently down over the sleeping world.

Sandy smiled cheekily back at it.

"Don't give me that look," he said softly, voice wafting on the still air. "Of course I knew it would all work out."


End file.
